Swedish Krona (SEK)

About the Swedish Krona

The Swedish Krona (SEK) is the official currency of Sweden, written with the symbol kr after the amount and issued by Sveriges Riksbank, the world's oldest central bank, founded in 1668. One krona is divided into 100 öre, but the last öre coin ceased to be valid in 2010, so the öre survives only as an arithmetical unit on electronic prices and cash is settled in whole kronor. The ISO 4217 code is SEK; the numeric code is 752.

The krona has floated freely since 19 November 1992, when Sweden was forced to abandon its fixed exchange rate after a defence that briefly pushed the Riksbank's marginal interest rate to 500 per cent. Monetary policy has since been governed by an inflation target — set in 1993 and formally applied from 1995 at 2 per cent — and the Riksbank has no target for the krona's exchange rate. Sweden is an EU member state, but the krona is not in ERM II and Sweden has no target date to adopt the euro.

The krona was introduced in 1873, when Sweden moved from a silver to a gold standard and formed the Scandinavian Monetary Union with Denmark; Norway joined two years later. One krona was set equal to one riksdaler riksmynt, the decimal unit of 100 öre that Sweden had counted in since 1855, and the kronor of Sweden, Denmark and Norway were equal in value until the union was definitively abolished in 1924.

The krona was the 13th most traded currency in the world in the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey 2025: over-the-counter foreign exchange turnover involving SEK averaged 158 billion US dollars per day in April 2025, roughly a 2 per cent share on a basis that counts both currencies in every trade. That placed the krona just behind the Indian rupee and the Korean won and ahead of the New Zealand dollar and the Norwegian krone.

Cash circulates in six banknote denominations — 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1,000 kronor — and four coins of 1, 2, 5 and 10 kronor. The series introduced in 2015 and 2016 added the 200-krona note, revived the 2-krona coin and made the coins smaller, lighter and nickel-free; each banknote portrays a 20th-century Swedish cultural figure, including Astrid Lindgren (20 kr), Greta Garbo (100 kr) and Dag Hammarskjöld (1,000 kr), with natural and environmental motifs on the reverse.